Porcine circovirus type 2 (PCV-2), is linked to PCV-2 associated disease, which has caused considerable economic loss in the swine industry. Here, we report the genetic diversity of PCV-2 in China. A total of 74 Chinese PCV-2 strains sequenced between 1999 and 2017 were studied. Based on the ORF2 and complete genomes, we found that apart from the PCV-2a, PCV-2b, and PCV-2d genotypes, two unstable recombination genotypes also exist, referred to as IM1 and IM2 genotypes. We found that the patterns of PCV-2 ge...

Chinese medicine is the treasure of China. It has been the safe guard of health in China for thousands of years. Processing of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is an important process of removing crude extracts from natural products and achieving pharmacological properties of TCM. The connotation and norms of herbal preparation in the past dynasties have been improved gradually, and have been included in the code system since the Tang Dynasty. The process of legislative evolution is closely related to the...

Medical tourism is an emerging industry that facilitates travel to another country for people who seek medical, surgical, or dental care that is unavailable or more affordable than in their home countries. Rapid advances in electronic communication and the ease of international travel have fueled the growth of this industry. More than half of medical travelers are women, especially for services related to cosmetic or reproductive conditions. Medical tourism creates both opportunities and challenges for nurs...

Global development goals increasingly rely on country-specific estimates for benchmarking a nation's progress. To meet this need, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 estimated global, regional, national, and, for selected locations, subnational cause-specific mortality beginning in the year 1980. Here we report an update to that study, making use of newly available data and improved methods. GBD 2017 provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specific mortality for 2...

Inevitable camera motion during exposure does not augur well for free-hand photography. Distortions introduced in images can be of different types and mainly depend on the structure of the scene, the nature of camera motion, and the shutter mechanism of the camera. In this paper, we address the problem of registering images taken from global shutter and rolling shutter (RS) cameras and reveal the constraints on camera motion that admit registration, change detection, and rectification. Our analysis encompas...

PCA has been widely used in many fields to detect dominant principle components, but it ignores the information embedded in the remaining components. As a supplement to PCA, we propose the General Component Analysis (GCA). The inverse participation ratios (IPRs) are used to identify the global components (GCs) and localized components (LCs). The mean values of the IPRs derived from the shuffled data are taken as the natural threshold, which is exquisite and novel. In this paper, the Chinese corporate bond m...

As one of the three pillars of Chinese medicine industry, traditional Chinese medicines prepared in ready-to-use forms are important raw materials for clinical medication and production of Chinese patent drugs. By considering the literature of Curcumae Radix, a multi-source Chinese herb and the situation of market investigation, the modern evaluation method based on traditional grading was introduced for comprehensive evaluation of the processed Curcumae Radix. The correlation between traditional grading me...

Photovoltaic devices based on perovskite materials have a great potential to become an exceptional source of energy while preserving the environment. However, to enter the global market, they require further development to achieve the necessary performance requirements. The environmental performance of a pre-industrial process of production of a large-area carbon stack perovskite module is analyzed in this work through life cycle assessment (LCA). From the pre-industrial process an ideal process is simulate...

The eye offers a unique opportunity for the non-invasive exploration of cardiovascular diseases. Optical angiography in the retina requires sensitive measurements, which hinders conventional full-field laser Doppler imaging schemes. To overcome this limitation, we used digital holography to perform laser Doppler perfusion imaging of human retina with near-infrared light. Two imaging channels with a slow and a fast CMOS camera were used simultaneously for real-time narrowband measurements, and offline wideba...

According to the Treaty on the Eurasian Economic Union, a common pharmaceutical market was supposed to become operational on January 1, 2016. Nevertheless, the responsible parties did not meet the deadline. Although a majority of the draft guidelines regulating this process were already known in 2014 and 2015, the anticipated process itself caused anxiety among representatives of the foreign pharma industry, who tried to prepare for coming challenges. Among other possible issues, the ambiguity of transition...

Internationalization of Traditional/Complementary Medicine (T&CM) products is important for initiating and sustaining developments in this field. Particularly for traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs), the global market continues to expand due to an interest in the potential clinical benefits of traditional approaches that are largely considered lower risk and lower cost than many conventional treatments. While the benefits of internationalization hold clear advantages for the business of T&CM products, keep...

We propose a reinforcement learning approach for real-time exposure control of a mobile camera that is personalizable. Our approach is based on Markov Decision Process (MDP). In the camera viewfinder or live preview mode, given the current frame, our system predicts the change in exposure so as to optimize the trade-off among image quality, fast convergence, and minimal temporal oscillation. We model the exposure prediction function as a fully convolutional neural network that can be trained through Gaussia...

High optical resolution in microscopy usually goes along with costly hardware components, such as lenses, mechanical setups and cameras. Several studies proved that Single Molecular Localization Microscopy can be made affordable, relying on off-the-shelf optical components and industry grade CMOS cameras. Recent technological advantages have yielded consumer-grade camera devices with surprisingly good performance. The camera sensors of smartphones have benefited of this development. Combined with computing ...

Person re-identification (re-ID) is cross-camera retrieval task that suffers from image style variations caused by different cameras. The art implicitly addresses this problem by learning a camera-invariant descriptor subspace. In this paper, we explicitly consider this challenge by introducing camera style (CamStyle). CamStyle can serve as a data augmentation approach that reduces the risk of deep network over-fitting and that smooths the camera style disparities. Specifically, with a style transfer model,...

Effects of PUFAs on metabolic syndrome (MetS) remain to be characterized, particularly in Asians. We aimed to investigate the prospective associations of PUFAs with MetS and the role of acylcarnitines in these associations in Chinese. Among 1,245 Chinese aged 50-70 who completed a 6-yr follow-up, baseline erythrocyte FAs and plasma acylcarnitines were profiled using gas chromatography coupled with positive chemical ionization and liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry, respectively. Total n-6 PUFAs ...

Efforts to establish the 2015 baseline and monitor early implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) highlight both great potential for and threats to improving health by 2030. To fully deliver on the SDG aim of "leaving no one behind", it is increasingly important to examine the health-related SDGs beyond national-level estimates. As part of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017), we measured progress on 41 of 52 health-related SDG indicators and e...

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2017 (GBD 2017) includes a comprehensive assessment of incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability (YLDs) for 354 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1990 to 2017. Previous GBD studies have shown how the decline of mortality rates from 1990 to 2016 has led to an increase in life expectancy, an ageing global population, and an expansion of the non-fatal burden of disease and injury. These studies have also shown how a substan...

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2017 comparative risk assessment (CRA) is a comprehensive approach to risk factor quantification that offers a useful tool for synthesising evidence on risks and risk-outcome associations. With each annual GBD study, we update the GBD CRA to incorporate improved methods, new risks and risk-outcome pairs, and new data on risk exposure levels and risk-outcome associations.

Market timing is an investment technique that tries to continuously switch investment into assets forecast to have better returns. What is the likelihood of having a successful market timing strategy? With an emphasis on modeling simplicity, I calculate the feasible set of market timing portfolios using index mutual fund data for perfectly timed (by hindsight) all or nothing quarterly switching between two asset classes, US stocks and bonds over the time period 1993-2017. The historical optimal timing path ...

BRICS, the acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, is the first multilateral group created and run by non-western developed countries. The group aims to influence world geopolitics and market based on the right of developing and emerging countries to participate equitably in development. The social issue lies at the core of the group's justifications to achieve its goals. In this regard, this paper aims to analyze how the social issue has been addressed by BRICS. The methodology was based...

Next generation implantable neural interfaces are targeting devices with mm-scale form factors that are freely floating and completely wireless. Scalability to more recording (or stimulation) channels will be achieved through distributing multiple devices, instead of the current approach that uses a single centralized implant wired to individual electrodes or arrays. In this way, challenges associated with tethers, micromotion, and reliability of wiring is mitigated. This concept is now being applied to bot...

Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) has the potential to influence energy consumption, environmental quality and economy directly and ETS price is the key of ETS market. On December 27, 2017, China's carbon trading market was officially launched, which may be the largest platform of ETS in the world. Therefore, this paper seeks to assess the influencing factors of emission trading price (industry coverage, the annual decline factor, and free allowance rate) and analyzes the impact mechanism in detail by applying ...

Assessments of age-specific mortality and life expectancy have been done by the UN Population Division, Department of Economics and Social Affairs (UNPOP), the United States Census Bureau, WHO, and as part of previous iterations of the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD). Previous iterations of the GBD used population estimates from UNPOP, which were not derived in a way that was internally consistent with the estimates of the numbers of deaths in the GBD. The present iteration...

Considerable research has been done on the complex stock market, however, there is very little systematic work on the impact of crisis on global stock markets. For filling in these gaps, we propose a complex network method, which analyzes the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis on global main stock index from 2005 to 2010. Firstly, we construct three weighted networks. The physics-derived technique of minimum spanning tree is utilized to investigate the networks of three stages. Regional clustering ...